In paradise
by Mrs Fruitcake
Summary: Transferred out of CID, Alex has nothing better to do than follow the trail of Artemis. GALEX: follows on from If I Start a Commotion doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you haven't read the series. As always, love your honest feedback.
1. Chapter 1

**Hello. This is the fourth in a series of six connected stories about A2A. It follows a lot of plot elements from the previous three and doesn't make a lot of sense if you haven't read them. The previous three stories are London Fields, Playing with the Big Boys and And If I Start a Commotion.**

_**I**_

When she bent her head over her desk and read the files before her, her mouth moved silently like someone murmuring in their sleep. He watched that – he could have sat nearby for hours just to rest his mind on what those lips were saying.

He didn't know everything, but he was quickly finding out and committing to memory. And he felt sure that some things he alone knew. Her eyes were hazel, although to the rest of the uncaring world they seemed brown. Her forehead bore a certain crease when she frowned, and she bent her wrist in a particular way when she leaned over her messy desk to pick up the phone.

Not that the phone rang often. And that secretly satisfied him too. That no one cared for her as she sat for hours in her office alone.

_Except for me. I watch, and she doesn't know. One day she might notice. _

And what would he do then?

"Royce? Royce!"

The hazel eyes were on him. He started and his square glasses slid from his nose to the floor.

"Err … Royce, your dad's calling you." Alex Drake pointed beyond her open office door to across the hall where Gilbert was taking his duffle coat from the coat-stand. "Sounds like it's home time."

Alex glanced at the clock on the wood panel wall of her dim office. Four o'clock. She smiled in sympathy as Royce turned to leave, stumbling over his school bag and scuffing his knees where the grey socks did not reach high enough. She handed him his glasses and he scurried off down the hall. "Until tomorrow ... you little weirdo," she breathed in relief. It was inevitable that he would turn up again promptly at half-past three after school, but if she had to go through too many more afternoons of Royce Gilbert sitting opposite her office, pretending to read his mathematics text book while staring at her fixedly until his father went home ... _Maybe I should have a word with his dad_. Gilbert was a reasonable sort and the only one who had really bothered to befriend her since her arrival three weeks ago at the Forensics Unit in Lambeth.

Even her manager hadn't said a word to her all day.

_I'll fix one problem right now. _She went to move the visitor chair that had been shifted yet again to the wall opposite her door. There was a piece of folded paper underneath the chair and she picked it up. A crudely drawn sketch of a woman with an impressive décolletage and curly mop of hair – _that would be me _– in the arms of a muscled behemoth in a torn singlet and jeans … and square glasses. _Oh god. _In a nod to naturalism, Royce had even drawn pimples on his likeness's face.

Alex picked the chair up and walked it all the way down the hall to the staff lunch room. A couple of members of the forensics investigation team were making toasted sandwiches in there, and nodded as she nudged the chair under the round table in the centre of the lunch room.

"How you settling in, DI Drake? Making any progress on those cases Marbury gave you?"

She'd been looking through the daunting pile of psychological profiles on some of the worst offenders in the Met's area for two weeks now. By the look on these men's faces, she suspected they knew as well as she did that it mattered not a jot what kind of progress she was making.

"It's very quiet here, isn't it?" She started to make herself a cup of tea. Maybe it was because Christmas was only three days away and people had peeled away slowly to their holiday or maybe it was the office layout itself – the long dark central corridor with its many cell-like offices off to each side. Or maybe it was because this whole team of forensics investigators and psychologists liked their solitude. She didn't even know these men's names.

"Quiet today because everyone's heading off to the game. Always clears out early when our team's playing." The man felt he needed to make an excuse. "I'm usually the goalie, but I've got a groin strain." He coloured instantly although DI Drake was stirring milk into her tea, unconcerned.

* * *

"You roll him over."

"It's my back, see." Carling winced as he bent to the sheeted corpse. He had pulled a muscle play-fighting with Chris Skelton and then pulled it again fighting for real with a drunken skin-head who had spent an afternoon smashing bottles against a neighbour's fence in Kilburn.

"You're right." Hunt turned around. "He's a tubby fat fucker. Skelton, get over here and turn the patient for us!" When turned onto his side, the dead man was found to have three substantial knife wounds in his fleshy back. The knife must have gone in deep before hitting his rib cage. Hunt made the motion with his hand and imaginary knife – plunging, repeated, not so careful strikes with a long blade. As usual, given they were standing in the entrance to the dead man's comfortable home, the kitchen knife had to be suspected.

Picking his way around the blood spatter, Hunt went into the kitchen. Everything in it had been painted or tiled a dark peacock blue and he paused to admire the neatness of the room. Everything in its place. And the knives? He opened drawer after drawer until he found them. Nothing seemed disturbed, but how would he know? Cook books crowded onto one of the higher kitchen shelves, and to one end of them a collection of diet guides – recipes for high-blood pressure, for the diabetic, for the invalid. "He don't need to worry about losing a few pounds now," he murmured to himself.

In the living room with its puffy forest green leather couches and soothing cream marble fireplace, Skelton and Carling were making themselves at home, unconcerned by the bustle of the forensics team around them. Carling had checked the brass fireplace poker as soon as they entered the living room. He did this at every crime scene, always willing the murder weapon to be a poker.

Evidently someone in the family wove rugs for a hobby. A loom, hung with a half-finished bright orange and blue creation, dominated one corner of the living room and a grand piano another. Rugs hung from many of the somberly painted walls – in the hall, in the bedrooms, even one facing you as you sat down on the toilet. Where there were no rugs on the walls, bright abstract paintings hung instead and in the hallway Hunt winced in distaste at a huge canvas painted in sloppy broad strokes of primary colour – a large naked woman stepping into a bath. He bent closer – there were spatters of blood across the canvas. The fleshiness of the painted woman mirrored the actual fleshiness of the shrouded victim lying further down the hall. Russell Conning, scientist and evidently diabetic with high blood pressure and heart trouble.

"What is it with posh folks? They can't leave a wall alone or just put a nice photograph of a bloody seaside town up." Buying a big house in St John's Wood, decorating every square inch of it with hippie rubbish. That was one future he knew he'd never have to face.

"Chris and I had better get moving, Guv." Ray started to zip up his leather jacket. "The match starts in half an hour and I've got to warm up properly or me back'll really go this time. It's bloody cold out there now and it's turning dark n'all. It's just the Forensics team, but we've got to paste em just to protect our reputation."

Hunt had seem fixated by the naked lady's huge pink nipples, but he turned on Ray suddenly. "Who did you say you're playing?"

"The fairies from Forensics. Come on, Chris, now. Have to get over to Lambeth."

Hunt blocked the entrance way. "I feel terrible for having detained you, Raymondo. Let me drive you over there so you're not late."

* * *

The caretaker had not been thoughtful enough to switch the pitch lights on until fifteen minutes before the game was due to start. Consequently the lights had warmed up only enough to share an eerie faint glow onto the field, and the two teams jogged around the park, sprigged boots treading gingerly, worrying about the holes in the dark uneven turf. It hadn't rained in London since December 10th and the pitch was hard as clay.

In the rickety stand on the Eastern edge of the Lambeth community sports grounds, a small crowd had assembled to watch the inevitable blood bath. Shaz Granger blew on her gloved hands, waving faintly to Chris as he jogged to stay warm in the goal as the game kicked off. There'd been a few mumbles about the referee from Biro, who sat beside her and followed the play with an intensity unmatched by any one else in the drift of reluctant spectators.

Rodney injured himself in the second minute with a slide into the ball that split his legs unnaturally, and heads quickly turned with a "phew god" and "what did I miss?" as he bit back tears and was helped to the club room bathrooms.

* * *

Justin Marbury, manager of the psychological assessment team in the Forensics unit, could only rally enough team spirit to rug himself up and watch from his car. Fenchurch East were thugs and he was sure, as he was sure he'd rather be home pouring himself a glass of brandy, that his unit's team would soon be crushed beneath the bull-dog sulleness and flying elbows.

Marbury looked up from his novel at the flash of white passing by his window. That was a surprise – DI Drake in her ridiculous white leather jacket, wandering down to the edge of the dark field. She had hardly communicated with anyone in the Forensics Unit since her hurried arrival. Of course, he'd had a debrief with Chief Superintendant Anthony Paulson about the need to find her a suitably absorbing piece of research, and he had to consider the matter for a day before dropping his case files into her office with the instruction to read the psychological assessments and look for any possible environmental connections.

Something about the stillness of her expression indicated that she had itched to throw the files on the floor, but she had taken them into her new office with barely a word, and he had left her alone from then on. Maybe it was her reputation for showing off her background in psychological profiling, or maybe her beauty and its unnaturalness in a workplace full of bearded men, red-haired men, curly-haired men … it made him uneasy and he hadn't invited her into his office for a drink as he did with the three other members of his team.

* * *

Five nil. Why didn't they call it off already? Shaz had paid no attention to the game, only to her own breath visible in front of her face. She wondered if the cold was why DCI Hunt had not stopped pacing the white paint line at the pitch edge. Since the incident with Dorothy Lange and her sons, he had had to throw his coat out and he hadn't bought another yet.

From her vantage point near the top of the stand, Shaz finally saw the reason for his pacing. She smiled to herself – he hadn't spotted DI Drake across the pitch, standing with a couple of the Forensic Unit's wives and just now accepting gratefully a thermos cup of coffee or tea.

* * *

Like little boys, the Forensics team had forgotten their game strategy and now followed the ball around the field in a pack. As the rumbling of their sprigged boots faded down yet again to their own goal area, and the full-time whistle blew, Hunt paused and looked down at the hard cold turf, green and bitten by the frosts that had descended every morning for a week.

He hadn't seen Drake in three weeks or so, and maybe the rapidity of her departure had felt like the suddenness of a frost. He hadn't really dwelt on the muttered explanation to the team at CID and her disgust at his capitulation to Vanderzee's demands – going over and over it would be so bloody weak. And so would sitting there at Luigi's, waiting for her to cross the threshold.

In fact Hunt had kept away from Luigi's, and consequently the others did too, so that the owner himself had finally come across to CID one afternoon to complain about their desertion. _I don know what is going on wit you, but why you punishing me for?_

He'd tried to remember what the steps were, how you enjoyed life with vigour, like he had in the good days back in Manchester with Tyler. Catching the rotten bastards who thieved from the people in the community, driving recklessly and waving a gun about because he was the law and that's what coppers could do. Side-stepping the orders of the brass, and falling asleep drunk a few hours before sunrise.

He sniffed, nose beginning to run. It was a beautiful still night. He wasn't sentimental, but there was something about floodlights – the purity in the light, the particles almost visible in the night air – that appealed to him. And under the white lights he found her, walking across the pitch to commiserate with the forensics lot, demoralised in their double-digit defeat, huddled in a circle as if the assault had only temporarily stopped although Carling and the others had run cheerily from the park, carrying Viv in their arms for his five goals.

The lights snapped off suddenly. The caretaker was anxious to get home to his steak and kidney pie. Christmas was nearly upon them, and who didn't want to be in their living room, with the decorated tree, the television on, and a bottle of beer in hand.

She walked on past her new colleagues – and something in him was gratified at her wanting nothing to do with them – heading straight to the stand. _She's coming to give me a piece of her mind. She is going to give it to me something rotten. _And meanwhile, he had lived without that queasy mix of annoyance and lust that had woken him early in the mornings. The surety that she was coming to the same place as him every day. If they fought, and if she rejected his crude advances, it had been enough.

And Alex Drake paused before the stand as the few spectators drifted back to their cars. "I just came to tell you that in case you think ..." The tone in her voice conveyed that she wasn't entirely sure **what** he might be thinking_. In case you were pining away for me, Bolls? _He never would have thought that.

"I did you a favour." He walked down the steps, slippery in the night dew. Didn't come too near. But really, after only seconds, he couldn't help himself. "Let me give you a ride home."

They were quite alone in this great expanse. Earlier in the day he had fantasised a little about ignoring the betrayed feelings she must be nursing, the righteous anger. He had thought about pounding on her door, bullish and demanding. They might not work together now, but why not continue on? Why not?


	2. Chapter 2

_**II**_

If only he could have persuaded her to get into the Quattro. The look on Vanderzee's face would have been priceless, Gene Hunt thought as he knocked on the front door of the Assistant Commissioner's large cream bungalow in Kenton. _Merry Christmas, you Dutch wanker. You remember my date, DI Drake. _But she'd declined his offer, of course. He hadn't expected anything else so his mood ... it hadn't risen or fallen.

He'd never actually been out North to this area before. The likelihood of Kenton's bungalow owners murdering, raping and blagging seemed fairly unlikely although he would have considered the same of the residents of St John's Wood until he'd rolled the body of Russell Conning, stabbed through his back fat rolls in his hallway in St John's Wood.

When Adrien Vanderzee welcomed him inside into the cream shag-pile carpeted hall it confirmed Hunt's worst fears. He'd come from the football match against Forensics and knew there must be turf on his boots. Vanderzee was playing the good host and clapped Hunt around the shoulders, wishing him a Merry Christmas. The invitees weren't exactly making merry, given that it was only the 21st and a Monday night. That and the quiet jazz playing on the impressive stereo made it pretty obvious how _going through the motions_ this party was for the host. And he spotted Vanderzee's wife in the first minute, passing around a cheeseboard, blank-faced in the midst of strangers.

_Just as I thought._ All the twonks he ignored at work every day, the bureaucrats, their wives, the comfortable types who worked two floors and more above the actual policing, the roughing-ups and the drunken score-settlings in reception. _And you're thrilled to see me, I can tell._ It gave him a shot of pride as he accepted a drink of some disturbingly sweet white wine from a cask, that no one came near him, and he moved without embarrassment through the large formal living room to the quiet dining room.

Claire Vanderzee wore a simple green dress tonight, tightly belted against her slim waist, the green setting off her crackling auburn hair, and Hunt could picture her sitting on a mossy knoll in an Aran knit cardigan and matching beret. When she held the wooden cheeseboard up to his chest and he looked blank, she sliced him a wedge of the Danish blue and walnut cheese ball onto a cracker and then passed on serenely by.

That left him alone again, looking into an enormous aquarium along one wall of the dining room. Dimly lit, the fish going about their business, darting out of each other's way, he caught conversations from the living room every now and then. Ski trips to the Alps had been planned, driving holidays through Ireland … he concentrated on the tiny plastic chest of treasure at the bottom right of the aquarium and wondered why Vanderzee had invited him. No other DCIs were here, no shin kickers, just the types that controlled budgets, wrote regulations and policies. And fuck them, they were talking about golf and rugby.

"Have this." Vanderzee handed him a Robinson's and looked into the aquarium as well, apparently all too at ease in his powder-blue knitted sweater. Just another facet to Mr Perfect, Hunt thought and sipped the ale. He'd been about to tip the wine into the tank. "Cheers then."

They clinked glasses. Vanderzee's eyes shifted around again as he sipped off the froth. Even in his own bloody home he was an uneasy bastard. And then he settled on Hunt. "Here's to an eventful 1982. You set quite a pace in prosecutions this year, Hunt. Keep it up and we'll both be celebrating a lot harder next Christmas."

_Right now_, Hunt thought as Claire Vanderzee switched Dave Brubeck for Handel's Messiah on the stereo, _my grandmother is celebrating harder than this at the Barnsley Home for the Seriously Incontinent._

"Any early leads on that murder over at St John's Wood?"

That gave Hunt just the excuse to glance at his watch. _Look at the time._ "Yes, about now one of my Detective Sergeants is bringing in the victim's wife for questioning. I'd better finish this," – he drained the glass effortlessly – "and be off."

"Cracking." There were short dark hairs around the AC's collar. His wife had evidently trimmed his careful hair just before the party. "Wrap it up quickly and you can enjoy your Christmas holidays in peace."

About right too, Hunt thought, walking back through the hall and past the coats and framed photos of gawky teenage children. It was fine if the scum of the East End lived in constant turmoil, dozens of murders unsolved. But one fat scientist in St John's Wood would have all of CID on the go until the very moment of Jesus's birth.

* * *

"Come on. You've got a lot of form. Form out the bloody window." Exasperated, Hunt looked from Vicky Conning to her lawyer. "You're a chemist and the toxicology report on your husband shows he had been taking sugar pills instead of his blood pressure and heart medicine for weeks. Who knows, longer? What happened, you got sick of waiting for him to have a heart attack so you stabbed him?"

She was a tall, thin woman, tanned enough to have aged ahead her years, with a very short layered hair cut that made her look even more boyish. Not a trace of make-up on her face, not a trace of grief either. No red eyes or teary moments of clutching a hankie and having to turn away. But she didn't look smug either and Hunt thought it again – for the second time tonight a woman who just looked blank. She didn't answer him – none of the 'what possible reason would I have' engagement, nothing. She looked to her lawyer and seemed to wonder what the cues were.

Hunt found himself a bit stunned, and for once he was the one rushing into break the silence. "You've been married to your husband for what twenty years? Happily married? I'm guessing not."

"How would you describe a happy marriage?" Again she seemed to be asking her lawyer. Vicky Conning blinked hard under the hard light in the interview room. An innocent person would have been screaming at him by this stage. Husband just dead, and he'd hauled her in to accuse her of murder, and she should have been threatening to sue.

"Do you have any children, Mrs Conning?"

"No."

"So on the weekends, it's just you at your loom and your husband …?"

"No." She wore a long skirt, but with sandshoes and no socks. An odd way to dress. "No, weaving is my husband's extracurricular activity, not mine." There was no instant connection – no '_was_ my husband's, I mean'.

He looked into her face with its many fine wrinkles and unchanging expression._ Extracurricular activity__._ He wanted an understanding between them, most suspects would play along, but he saw she didn't. Maybe right now he wished DI Drake was here to shed some light on this impossible person.

* * *

In his sixteen years, Royce Gilbert had not learnt the social nicety that was called **taking a bloody hint**_._

Alex had tried to be sweet, had tried shutting the door to her office although the small, dark-panelled space made her feel even more trapped. She'd tried talking to his father as well. But Gilbert had not seemed to comprehend that, with his school now having broken up for the Christmas break, Royce had spent the better part of Tuesday squirming on a chair near her office or borrowing pens from her desk or taking books from the shelves in her office and flicking through them loudly. He seemed to eat every fifteen minutes. He never seemed to run out of food. She could hear him eating and if she looked up, he looked up, mouth open and chewed food visible.

Finally she slammed down a hand on top of the file that he had started to open. "Royce! I'm not kidding you. I have work to do. You can't go through private files." She stood. "Where's your father? We really have …"

Royce darted around to where she'd been sitting, his eyes on the file there. Alex had been looking at it so intently for two hours, he'd noted. It was important to her. His eyes lit at the rows of numbers. "What's this?'

"What?" She turned quickly, making to smack down her hand again.

"It's a code, isn't it?" He wiped greasy crisp fingers on his grey sweatshirt. Club 88, the military lettering on the sweatshirt said.

"None of your business, Royce." She imagined the satisfying thwack sound a nice heavy book on his head would make. But he'd excitedly picked up his maths textbook and was flipping through it. "Look, I read this section in first term. We didn't cover it in class, but it's really fascinating." 'Cracking a code', she read. Just a small break-out section in the text, but she read on. She had been looking at the numbers in the Actaeon file on and off for days – entire pages of just numbers, no spaces. There had seemed no hope of figuring it out.

She knew the basics of codes and could tell this was no simple puzzle, not like the tube station levels in Edgehampton that Viv had deciphered for them. This was a professional code and she knew nothing about what kind of ciphers MI5 or the military would have been using in the 1980s. And while she was great at remembering numbers, maths had never been a strong suit for Alex Drake.

"Do you want me to solve it?" Royce was already reaching for the file. _Just give me a chance, _his expression said_._ The opening he had been waiting for. She hesitated, withholding the file from him, and then she took a page from the file and gave it to him.

"Okay, see what you can find out. But you've got to be careful. Don't tell your dad, and for god's sake, don't lose the page."

Royce looked insulted at the idea until she returned to him the folded sheet of paper with his sketch and then he shouldered his bulging school bag and disappeared into the corridor.

* * *

"It was funny seeing DI Drake last night." Shaz avoided the end of the chocolate bar Chris was trying to feed her. They were sitting in her Morris Minor outside his flat, and had been kissing silently for a sweet half hour. "I wish she'd stopped and spent some time with us."

"Do you?"

"Yes." She leaned away from Chris. "I miss her. Don't you, Chris?" Since DI Drake's immediate transfer at the start of December the office had quickly reverted to its prior state: everyone agreeing with Ray Carling, dozy afternoons spent playing darts and the endless requests for her to make a cuppa.

"Ahh...." He wasn't sure what the correct answer was. With Shaz out of the room, the team had made the inevitable jokes about one of them having to dress like a tart now, just to keep the Guv sweet. Naturally every one had volunteered him. "I dunno. It's not so … you know … noisy around now that she's not here. I mean, she and the Guv used to argue all the time. Give you a headache."

"Ye-ah, because she stood up to him. And she was right most of the time." It wasn't just that DI Drake had shown her how to handle a bunch of blokes, the bullies, the slobs, the smutty ones so cowardly they'd only throw the innuendo behind your back. Shaz had never seen DCI Hunt as some kind of Northern man hero like the rest of them. But she had admired DI Alex Drake. And wished she'd come over to talk with her at the football game.

"DI Drake is probably better off at Forensics. Y'know. They're odd, swotty types, and she talks to herself and says weird things 'n' all." The way he spoke, yeah he knew his words were wrong. "I'm just saying that the team is probably better off back to normal."

Back to normal? Shaz reached over him and pushed the passenger door open. She didn't tell him to get out, but Chris got the point.

* * *

"I'm glad you're back, Signore." Luigi poured Hunt a complimentary beer and leant over the bar to tweak his cheeks affectionately.

"Alright, steady on. I've still got a dossier on you back in CID in case you lot get any funny ideas about invading Europe again."

Where Hunt led, the others followed. So Luigi knew that if Hunt returned to spending his nights in the restaurant, then the rest of them would as well. Perhaps he didn't personally relish spending every night trying to comprehend their in-jokes – English humour was relentless – but he would be grateful for the boost to his nightly takings.

After a few drinks at the bar, Hunt shouting him for one every round he bought himself and Ray, Luigi began to understand. Not so subtle though; by the shifty look in Hunt's eyes he must have thought he was keeping it cool. Hunt had asked after his wife, his family, his plans for Christmas … this was Hunt, the rudest man he'd ever met … and then with a casual jerk of his thumb over in the direction of the staircase, he enquired after Signorina Drake's whereabouts.

Hunt was drunk now and he looked into Luigi's eyes and there was that understanding. It was like they were both nodding at each other, even though they weren't. _Capisco benissimo_. I understand you perfectly.

* * *

"S'alright anyway. Team's better off now, isn't it Carling?" Ray had found a new lady love at another table and he brought her empty glass back to the bar. "Without Drake, we're focused again on good old-fashioned nickings. I don't miss the insanity one bit. It can be catching, you know."

"I'll bet you don't miss your DI practically dropping her draws in the bar here every night either. That can be catching too." Carling handed over the glasses with a suppressed beer burp. "Poor Luigi. Didn't know where to look when she started carrying on." He caught Hunt's frown. "I just mean that every second night was like 50p drinks nights at the Legs Lounge when Drake was in business."

Hunt raised his eyebrows, but just chose to drain his beer and tap the bar for another. Carling hadn't taken the hint. "It was probably going alright for her until that conference in Brighton where she went all looney. We're still pulling grief for that one from the stations around here. Better off that she's with all those Marys over at Forensics, poking corpses all day."

"Are you quite finished?"

Ray knew better than to argue with him, but sometimes he couldn't follow his moods quickly enough. "There was that rumour going round as well. That she threw herself at you and you had to fight her off, and that's when the Chief Super had to step in." Hunt and Luigi exchanged the briefest of glances. "That bird who works for Vanderzee was telling Paulson's secretary that there was some kind of concern that she'd got the wrong idea, and was making a fool of herself about you. I told her not to believe everything she hears, but then again...." Carling nudged him. "We've all seen her in action. Frightening." He took a long draw on his cigarette.

Hunt threw a pound note down on the bar and strode to the door. Drake was standing there, and Carling had been speaking loud enough for her to hear his entire monologue.

"DI Drake! We were just talking about how quiet it is around without you!" Ray nearly fell off the barstool, but managed to keep his cigarette in his mouth. His new bird and the few other people still eating this late at night were all looking on.

Luigi sprang forward to smooth over the awkward moment that followed. But she only looked at Hunt, and in the candlelight her eyes were dark and gloomy. "Drink for you, Signorina."

"Is this what you've been telling CID, then?"

"No." Without turning, he pushed a straight arm into Ray's chest to back him off.

"Pathetic," she murmured.

"Carling." Hunt grabbed the scruff of Ray's leather jacket. "Explain that I am not responsible for talking rubbish about DI Drake." Carling said nothing. "I am not having this bleeding conversation. Carling, go home, you sodding idiot." He pushed him through the door and closed it with a bang. "What?"

"You don't get to do this." There was the whole expanse of the restaurant, but here he couldn't stop himself from bearing down on her. Alex pushed him aside and started walking up the stairs.

"What are you talking about?" he yelled up the stairs, and she advanced back down to stop a couple of steps above him. He thought of the moment weeks ago when he'd pushed her up these stairs to get her into her flat, get her clothes off.

"You're not hanging around here anymore." She silenced his protests – this was _his_ place, _he'd_ found it. In typical Drake arrogance, she'd now claimed it and maybe her look told him she knew it was a little pathetic, but she was going to punish him anyway. "You get your own way at work, but here you need to stay away from me."

And then she looked back over her shoulder as she climbed the stairs again, and caught him staring at her hips and arse. "Night, Gene."


	3. Chapter 3

_**III **_

Back in 2008 this would only have taken a minute of googling, Alex thought as she parked her car and walked for five minutes over icy footpaths crowded with slow-moving Christmas shoppers. It was daft to even attempt to come into the city, but back at her office it had seemed like a good excuse for escaping the empty halls. Only Gilbert remained now. On the 23rd, everyone else had said their goodbyes, or not (some people in the Forensics Unit were so anti-social that they just left for the year, hoping they wouldn't have to make any awkward goodbyes on the way to the car park).

She went into the library, straight into the blast of the overheated halls and felt queasy at the sudden change in temperature. The cold was bracing when you already felt tense and edgy. This sickening heat … she quickly made her way to the reference section and examined the shelves. There were several dictionaries of Classical Greek mythology and she pulled out the most recent, flipped through it until she found the entry: Artemis and Actaeon.

_Actaeon was a Theban prince and hunter, out in the woods with his dogs when he came to a stream that ran through a vale on Mount Cithaeron, a place sacred to Artemis. Artemis, the virgin goddess, would not let anyone see her in the nude, but at the stream Actaeon chanced on her bathing and spied on her from the bushes. Embarrassed, she changed him into a stag, and his own dogs chased him through the woods. The dogs caught him and tore him apart._

Artemis and Actaeon. The two files had to be linked – they were already linked through her parents, although the connection from her mother and father to the possession of another file from Edgehampton puzzled her. Thinking of Actaeon, with its endless pages of coded numbers, it seemed hopeless that she would ever find more about it. But maybe Artemis held clues. Maybe Artemis somehow decoded Actaeon.

_The dogs caught him and tore him apart_, she repeated to herself. She had copied the passage from the dictionary down and slid it into her jacket pocket. "I need the Artemis file," she said aloud to herself as she turned the key in her car's ignition. _I need it._

* * *

After week of getting nowhere with Russell Conning's murder, Hunt brought the team together around Drake's empty desk to discuss a new lead. Jimmy had found a motive for Vicky Conning to have killed her husband.

"Her name's Amanda Hook. Everyone me and Biro talked to at the laboratory where Conning worked mentioned it straight away. Apparently Russell was having an affair with this gorgeous journalist bird and he wasn't interested in keeping it a secret." Jimmy pinned a picture, taken in surveillance the afternoon before, onto the whiteboard next to the morgue photo of Russell. "People there said she used to come around a fair bit and Russell was pretty open about it."

"I can understand him wanting to shout the news out, but what would she want with a fat twat like Russell Conning?" Like the rest of the team, Hunt paused to admire the legs of the woman captured climbing out of her car. "And am I mistaken, but she looks like she's severely up the duff? No wonder his wife killed him. The tubby git was shagging this bird and knocked her up."

They stared in silence again. "It's hard to believe, it really is." Russell. Bearded, double chin, grey tweed trousers, brogues, shirt button popping out over his belly.

"Russell's secretary at the laboratory stated that they had been having this affair for a good few months," Jimmy said. "Apparently she left her boyfriend for Conning and whenever he called her up, she'd be over like a shot. They couldn't believe it either, but they said she really loved him."

Hunt still couldn't believe it, but he told Jimmy and Ray to investigate Amanda Hook's ex-boyfriend and find out more about what Vicky knew. He walked out into the reception where Viv, on the phone, beckoned him over.

"Actually ma'am, he's right here now." Viv handed the phone to Hunt, but he heard nothing more than a word and then the phone rang off.

"Sorry, sir. The caller wanted to speak to you."

"Skip, I told you not to put anyone through."

"Yes, but she was quite insistent on knowing whether you were in the office and available to speak to."

* * *

She hadn't done this in a long time – the two hair-pins wouldn't find the right spot in the lock and she thought she could hear someone on the stairs. At Langley her photo had gone on a leader-board for lock-picking records: five seconds. _And it's such a cheap lock too,_ Alex thought, rattling the door one more time. For once she wished for Ray's thick hambone thighs so she could have kicked the door down and be inside already.

Leaning down to listen to the lock, she finally heard that familiar ticking sound and another and the door-knob turned. Quickly inside, Alex laughed in triumph. She was standing in Gene Hunt's hallway.

"Okay, Gene. We've got all afternoon. Reveal to me your innermost secrets." She switched the light on because the curtains were still drawn in the living room, and tiptoed down the floorboards.

One thing was a relief: no man stink. She had imagined that without a cleaner and with the ex-wife just a memory, Gene must be a pig. He'd always spoken in pride of liking his own mess. _Well it's not spotless or anything,_ she thought as she picked up a photo of him from his army days, _but it's hardly a student flat either. _Hands on hips, she had to admire the orderliness of the sofa suite clustered around the television, one chair drawn up closer so that he could follow the match of the week, no doubt.

Going through his video tapes she knew none of the names – High Noon, 3:10 to Yuma, The Searchers – and smiled to herself at the image of him making careful copies off the television.

There was a sizeable build-up of cigarette butts in the many ash-trays stashed around the flat of course, and as if she needed it, evidence in the emptiness of the fridge that Gene didn't cook much. The eggs smelled vaguely sulphuric and a glass jar of blackcurrent jam had spilled into the fridge shelf below it.

_Stay focused, Alex. It won't be in his kitchen. _Down the hall was the flat's spare bedroom and it was completely empty. So Gene had no hobbies to speak of – no secret passion for pasting together model warplanes or collecting cricketing manuals. But stopping at his bedroom door, she noted the bookcase in the hallway; it was surprisingly full, mostly with pulp paperbacks – Zane Grey of course – but also a smattering of Raymond Chandlers, Agatha Christies and histories.

"There's a lot of grey in this flat," she said to herself, and a lot of space too. He didn't have much furniture, but somehow it felt that he had exactly the right amount. There was no clutter, there was nothing pretty, and she felt surprisingly at ease.

On her way over to the flat, she had already pin-pointed his bedroom as the place most likely to hold the Artemis file. Gene would want to sleep near it, knowing the likelihood that MI5 was still hunting the file.

His bed was unmade and she bent down to check behind the headboard, inhaling the smell of his aftershave from the pillow. Clean white pillows, dark grey plain bedspread. Something about it touched her, and Alex thought with a faint sense of guilt of how she had nearly lain down next to him that one night in her flat, before Hunt had found Dorothy Lange's body-guard dead outside her door.

Hands on her breasts, panting as he had got so close to pulling her jeans down and lifting her up into him. The embarrassment at Gene having ever done that had lessened, replaced by the intense anger at his having stepped aside and said nothing as Paulson arranged her hasty transfer – _my own construct consigned me to the oblivion of the bloody Forensics Unit_, and she turned away to his chest of drawers.

"Briefs, briefs, boxers, singlet, briefs, boxers, socks..." She threw each item carelessly behind her. "Hiding anything in here, Gene?"

"More to point, Bolly, why are you perving at my undergarments?"

* * *

She had her hands on a manilla folder at the bottom of the drawer and was lifting it slowly, but Gene could move quickly when he had to. He slapped the folder away, but his fingers still held her hand, his thumb pressuring her soft palm.

"My good old-fashioned crime instinct told me I should get home pronto." Actually the one word she'd spoken into the phone before she rang off had clued him in. Viv might have been fooled, but he knew the timbre of her voice intimately. "Look what I've caught, ma."

_No excuse, Bolly._ Well beside the fact that he was enjoying this moment immensely.

"Yes well." Alex looked down at their entwined hands before lifting her own away. "I suppose finding a woman in your flat at midday..."

"Happens all the time."

" … I'll cut to the chase. I wasn't snooping. I was just looking for that file you found at Edgehampton. I guess, since you're here now, I can just ask … nicely for it?"

"Oh." His lips kept the 'O' shape in a sarcastic gesture. "And what was so nice about last night when you told me never to darken Luigi's door again?"

Her face changed. He read it and put his fingers back down on the manilla folder. "So I have something you want, which makes me feel quite warm inside. But, DI Drake, do you have something I want in return?"

Gene thought she must have caught her breath because she looked down momentarily, as if silently weighing matters up.


	4. Chapter 4

_**IV**_

"I have to get back to my work," Alex said, pushing hard on the heavy swinging door that led to a ramp and the entrance to the women's remand prison. Hunt followed, jingling the keys to the Quattro.

"Yeah, yeah, but first … I'm not wrong am I? There's something strange about that Conning woman? If she'd confessed to a dozen murders right in the interview room, I wouldn't have been surprised."

She contemplated the last twenty minutes of her conversation with Vicky Conning in the visitor's area. Vicky hadn't said much – she hadn't kept quiet, but she hadn't been effusive. It had only taken five minutes to ascertain one thing. "She's Asberger's, Gene."

"Ass what?"

"She has a **syndrome**called Asberger's. It's a neurobiological disorder. I can't tell how extreme in her case, but it's why she seemed odd to you when you interviewed her. She has very limited social or communication skills." They strolled down the ramp slowly as she gestured to demonstrate the points she was thinking aloud. "You would have thought that she seemed odd and cold when you interviewed her because to you it seems she's guilty, a ruthless killer. When in fact that is just the way she relates to the world. Or doesn't relate, more to the point." She glanced his way, noting the unyielding sternness in his expression when he was grappling with anything harder than pouring a glass of wine. "I just bet she was bewildered trying to deal with you. I can imagine that you stood there and shouted at her, and she would have been mystified. She probably can't read sarcasm, or follow cues. Nothing. Understanding someone like you … it would be like navigating a ship through a coral reef."

"She's a chemist, Bolls. She has to deal with customers every day."

"Gene," she sniffed. "You and the team have been doing your usual half-arsed investigation. She's not a retail chemist. She doesn't give people advice about cough medicines. Vicky works in a research lab too, like her husband. Probably spends all day alone."

He remembered how Vicky had looked to her lawyer as if for a translation of what he was saying. "So, you're saying she's mentally ill and she probably didn't kill her husband?"

Alex slid into the front seat beside him. "No. She may veer towards the extreme scale for Asberger's, but she's not by any means impaired. Like all of us, she's just as capable of plotting terrible revenge over love gone wrong." Breathing out those last words – in the consciousness of how quiet the car was, with the windows fogging up from their body warmth – she quickly covered with, "It sounds like her husband may have been treating her very badly by carrying on with someone else. She mentioned it to me, and she seemed open about it."

Hunt rolled his eyes and showed her a photo of Russell Conning from the folder in his back-seat. "I'm not a bird, so I'm asking for your expert opinion. Would you risk a long prison sentence over this bloke?"

"Errr, love is a many-splendoured thing." Alex glanced back at the folder. "I thought that was the Artemis file." Her brows were knitted together, peevish now. "I've given you my opinion, as you asked. We're even. Now where's the file?"

"There's no hurry, Bolls." The car jerked forward as he took the brake off. They sped through the winding prison road, the dead leaves of the surrounding trees carefully raked into the gutters. "Besides, you left my underwear drawer in a right state. Fair's fair. You'd better rectify the situation." At her refusal to taunt him back he added, "You could have just asked, you know."

"Could I?" _I don't want to be pulled back into this,_ she thought. _This to and fro that will never go anywhere._

* * *

They were soon in the back streets of a dozen suburbs leading back to Lambeth. She couldn't relax in the car. It wasn't just him, his driving or the lingering annoyance at having been caught in his flat, flinging his underwear around the room. Vicky's stillness, her dignified calm, had touched her in the interview room, as had her lawyer's whispered plea outside afterwards. The lawyer - a woman whose name she had not caught - was very worried that Vicky would present so badly before a judge and then a jury, that a murder conviction was certain. Alex knew it was all too likely. Vicky could not fake emotion, could hardly even show the grief she perhaps felt if innocent. A jury would look harshly on her and judge Vicky Conning a ruthless, callous killer. It was obvious Hunt was still wavering toward that conclusion.

_But it's not my concern_, Alex thought, now sneaking a glance at Hunt as he drove one-handed, the other on the gear-stick. She had no time to ensure that, guilty or innocent, Vicky Conning was given the benefit of a thorough investigation and fair trial. After all, for all she could reach out to touch the faces of those she talked to, they were still constructs. _My objective is to leave this place, and when I do they will disappear in a second._

And although the fact that Gene Hunt had caught up her hand on that day of her parents' deaths had woken her many times in the night – _it happened so he might be real_ – she still knew that the end of this world, and the return to the real one, was a zero-sum outcome. _I am only a connection away from you, Molly. One world opens back up to me and this one disappears.  
_

"You can drop me here." It was around the corner from the entrance to the Forensics Unit car-park. "Better not have anyone spotting us and reporting back to your master." Her hand was on the door.

"I didn't tell CID any rubbish about you … what Ray was saying. I didn't say it." He'd heard the rumours doing flying about the building – in his ill humour, the thought that her transfer was being blamed on her passionate and unrequited love for him had even made him smile – but he hadn't started them.

"It doesn't matter, Gene. It's just so 1980s." That all those zip-up loafer wearing buffoons at CID would look at her and Gene Hunt, and still ridiculously assume that she had fallen bleakly in love with him. He was their leader, and in his glamour they hoped to see themselves reflected. "Besides, I don't need you defending me. I have a new team here, and they actually aren't frightened of women. Some of them even like us."

The lies were coming so easily that she could gloss over the guilty, pathetic thought that she was making him jealous with a spotty little weirdo named Royce. "I have all new defenders, Gene, and if sometimes they think I'm the teensiest bit strange, unlike you I doubt they'll throw me under the bus at the first opportunity. Now give me the bloody Artemis file and get your team of muppets to do some real investigative work. Leastways, ensure the poor woman gets a fair trial."

* * *

Ray had Amanda Hook picked out as soon as he and Chris came through the doors into the long newsroom - desk after desk, most of them filled with fat-arsed journalist twats. As they made their way to her, the young bloke sitting next to her leaned in for a comforting hug. "It's going to be alright," he said to her as Ray flashed his warrant card.

Ray knew he usually came across as brutish, but still he was sensitive to the fact that she'd lost someone so recently.

"Stuart says I shouldn't even be here," Amanda Hook said with a shuddering smile as Ray and Chris sat down heavily by her desk. "But no one gives you a day off work because your married boyfriend's dead."

Carling nodded, noting that Hunt was pretty good at spotting pregnant birds because in person she didn't look so terribly expectant. He knew nothing about it of course, although people usually said the same things about pregnant women – they glowed, they ate odd food, they cried a lot. End of. "Has this come as a terrible shock to you?" Normally he would let Chris ask the soft questions, but he couldn't be brutal with her condition and all.

Yes, she nodded and she began to cry again. She blushed easily, and Ray had to glare at the idiot next to her so he didn't leap up to hug her again. After a minute she pulled a brass-framed photo of Russell Conning from her desk. "I know he was married, but we were in love." She held the photo out to them, and though Chris'd seen him dead and naked, he pretended to examine it in earnest. "He was a lovely man. He cared for me, and he would have made a wonderful father." _If he'd had the chance_, her look said. "People at his work would whisper about us, and I guess Vicky found out eventually."

"Do you know Vicky?" Chris asked.

"Not really, but I know how he talked about her." More in sorrow than in anger, she added, "I know I have some guilt here, but I loved Russell and he loved me. We wanted nothing more than to be happy. But we didn't want to upset Vicky. Even though we did."

"You think Vicky killed him though?" Chris handed the photo of Russell back.

Amanda's sub-editor whistled over a few desks that her story was due for filing by the top of the hour, but it seemed the last thing on her mind as she leaned forward confidingly. "Russell said he just knew that Vicky was very angry about … him and me. She said nothing, but he told me he was worried that there was something going on inside her. But you never act on those thoughts, do you? And how would you act anyway? Before someone has done something terrible?"

* * *

"I just got off the phone with Paulson, who tells me that woman who murdered her husband in St John's Wood is now out on parole." Out of his powder-blue sweater, Vanderzee was back to looking grim and unimpressed again. "Hunt, tell me how that happens?"

They were walking down the hall, snatching a moment before the Assistant Commissioner entered three hours of meetings with the Met Commissioner and Police Minister.

"Sir, it may not be a bad thing. She's not a danger to the community most likely." Hunt's hands were in his pockets. "Being able to monitor Vicky Conning's movements may actually help us with the investigation."

"What else do you need to investigate? Tie up the forensics and give the Crown something to prosecute. Do it quickly." Vanderzee paused to look at his reflection in the glass over a wall painting. "Cases like this should be wrapped up very quickly."

"Well it may not be as simple as it seems … I know the evidence looks like she did it, but-"

"Stop pissing about. I don't want to hear about you going down blind alleys. She's as guilty as sin, now wrap it up and move on." He was eyeing the grand carved oak double doors that led through to the meeting chamber, and he lowered his voice. "You are the only one in this whole place keeping up a decent conviction rate. The others around here have been covering their arses ever since Scarman told them new policing is about being the public's best friend. You know I rely on you, Hunt."

* * *

"DI Drake." Justin Marbury had a way of twisting in his office chair and examining you from a queer angle. As if the motion gave him some special insight. Typical psychologist move, she thought. "DI Drake, I hope you haven't found your transfer to Lambeth too hard to adjust to. I feel **bad **that we haven't sat down and talked before so... here we are."

His office was book-lined, neat enough. Marbury wore a great enveloping sweater instead of his usual suit. Even in a great heavy knit, with its slightly ridiculous Native American pattern, he seemed formal.

"I'm enjoying the quiet, Justin," she replied evenly. Always use their first name. Anything more formal and they instantly expected it.

"Marvellous. Yes, I know we're a studious bunch here, and not so much like your previous team over at CID. I've never had a lot of dealings with DCI Hunt's outfit before, and I was certainly surprised when the old gossip mill round here told me you'd landed there and that you were – lord knows – using psychological profiling as part of the mix. CID's famous for their arrest first, ask questions later attitude."

"That's not entirely..." Well in all fairness, yes it **was** true.

He interrupted anyway. He hadn't called her in for a conversation really. "I know it's close to Christmas now so things can get pretty casual round here, but I'd still like to make it clear that we have a bit of way of doing things in the psychological assessment team. For instance … you disappearing for most of the morning and afternoon. It's not that I don't want you to feel like you're free to come and go, it's just we have a heavy case-load..."

Alex had never met a bunch of people less usefully employed, but she let him continue until he seemed assured that she felt herself gently admonished. Justin then wished her a fond and cheery Christmas, and she shut the door after herself. Lingered in the dark corridor.

She hadn't noticed at first. How much like her father Justin Marbury was. The tone of his voice, his slimness, even the clothes he wore, the slight femininity in his manner. Had she ever noted those qualities herself as a child? No. Only in those last two days before his death had she met him again as an adult, and she felt now that of course she hadn't really met him at all. He had seemed to her just like the father of her eight-year-old self. Brave, kind, the most intelligent man in the world.

_But then I never knew him at all. I thought he was the voice of Aslan. All things good._

Justin Marbury had invited her to join him in a drink of brandy at his desk. The thought had brought back the terrible sea-sickness feeling that came intermittently in this world. The offer as repulsive as if she were to sit down now with her father to toast Christmas and the New Year.


	5. Chapter 5

_**V **_

The Minister of St Barnabas, St John's Wood, bent forward to accept the collection plate from his altar boy as the stuporous hymn drew to a close. Russell Conning's friends and family had apparently not come in fine singing voice. Then his eulogiser had found himself mumbling before a front row consisting of Russell's wife and suspected murderer.

_I haven't been this disturbed by a public speech since Drake dropped that load of insanity on the top brass in Brighton_, Hunt thought, arms spread across the pew at the very back of the church. He'd attended many funerals as a police officer, none as just a person. Perhaps that's why he kind of liked this. Dipping in and out of the most important days of people's lives.

Never got invited to weddings of course. Just the summing up of a fat bloke's life, with all the interesting bits omitted for the sake of his elderly parents from Maidstone. And behind him the undertakers were not so stealthily making preparations for the coffin's removal from the front of the church back into the hearse.

Wait up … he craned forward at the sound. Amanda Hook was weeping so loudly that the water-logged eulogy had drawn to a halt. Her weeping became a keening and although a woman began to cradle her in comfort (attempting perhaps also to stifle the embarrassing sobs) Amanda could not stop. Finally, the woman drew her to her feet and Amanda clutched her purse to her pregnant belly. She stopped on the red carpeted aisle.

"Murderer!" She pointed a finger at Vicky Conning. "How can you even be here today?" She beseeched the mourners. "How can you stand being here with her?"

Until then Vicky Conning had been sitting, seemingly quite content with her lonely place in the no-man's land of the front pew. No one else sat around her. They hadn't had the courage to keep her away from the funeral, and no one had the courage to sit with her either. Now Vicky turned in astonishment at the wailing of Amanda Hook. Had she even known that Amanda was attending? But she said nothing, and turned back to the Minister.

_J'accuse,_ Hunt thought.

* * *

"Merry Christmas, Alex." Royce Gilbert handed her the box of chocolates he'd carefully wrapped. His mother had been baffled and a little thrilled that her hitherto unloveable son had suddenly found a sweet-heart. A secret sweet-heart who now looked at the box he placed carefully on her desk as if it were a parcel bomb.

"What's this?"

He'd crept into her office so quietly. A big surprise. "I bought them with my lawn-mowing money."

"This is so not appropriate, Royce. Now put that away before your father catches you. You're going to get me in trouble."

His eyes were tiny behind his square glasses. Tiny, but suddenly quite unblinking. In his furtive daydreams, she hadn't been quite this … rude. "You were nice enough to me the other day when you asked me to decode your page of silly numbers."

Alex's expression softened somewhat. "Oh yes. I'd forgotten. I guess you haven't had time to look into that, what with all the lawns to mow and everything. Can I have it back?"

Royce's voice had broken a couple of years ago, but occasionally, a distressful situation could find the cracks in it again. "What do you mean, you think I just forgot about it? I told you I would figure it out for you."

"I shouldn't have asked you to. I'm sorry." She asked for the page back again. "I know myself from looking at it that's not just some simple code that you can break without a computer."

"I **know** that." He really was getting quite indignant now at the patronising tone in her voice. "I took the page to the mathematics department at University College. My mother works in the library there." At the look of alarm building in her hazel eyes, he hastily added, "Don't worry, Alex. I copied every number from the page out and I told them it was a competition I was trying to win. I never showed them the original." He opened his bag a trifle as if the page was likely to emanate a magical glow like the Holy Grail. "They ran it through the computer lab."

"And?"

"And..." Here was the real moment of triumph. "Wouldn't **you** like to know?"

"Yes I bloody would." With a slam, a strange man shut the door behind him, and wrenched the school bag from Royce's grasp. The contents were promptly emptied onto the office floor. "What do we have here then? Marmite sandwiches, cordial." He kicked these aside and picked up the folded sketch. Paused. "Badly drawn filth," and now the hand-written page of numbers. Alex bent first to snatch it up. On the back of the page were two surnames.

"The computer could only find these names as patterns on the page," Royce muttered. "It's only a small part of the code, but it's a start. But I ... I don't think I want to help you anymore." His eyes widened as Alex whispered something into the man's ear.

"Where's the original page? Don't make me search you, son. I will come down on you like a ton of bricks"

Alex snatched the page from the Artemis file from Royce's hands and disappeared into the corridor to pore over the names in the silence there.

Glancing up through his glasses at Hunt, Royce scrambled to scoop his things back into the school bag, dignity giving way to fear. He had a hand on the door-knob ready to flee, but turned back momentarily. "You … and she?" This pocky, mean-faced man and her. It was too horrible to enunciate.

"Making progress," the man said as he lit a cigarette. "She's mad about me. You could tell, couldn't you?"

* * *

J'accuse, a very moving, convincingly acted j'accuse.

And yet, Hunt noted as he flicked another cigarette butt into the gutters and watched from the sunless side of Warwick Street, Amanda Hook's grief had somewhat dissipated as she climbed the front steps to her terrace home, the lemon yellow maternity dress still revealing the shapeliness of her legs and breasts.

A man – dark eyed, perhaps younger than her – ran from the doorstep as if he'd been expecting her for some time. He swept her up into his arms, and held her there for a good minute, uncaring of the families passing by on Christmas Eve street visits or the old woman with her coke-bottle glasses looking on in dismay. _Very friendly_, he thought, as he planted ardent kisses on her flushed cheeks in the open doorway and then took her inside.

_Ray Carling, you complete tit. _Ray had sat on his desk in CID and assured him that very morning that he and Chris had looked thoroughly into the background of Amanda Hook. Sure, she was a journalist, and all journos were the enemy, but there was nothing to note. _Nothing to note except she's just left the funeral of her lover to be with Julio Fucking Iglesias._

None of this made a whole lot of sense. Hunt set his collar against the chill wind and walked away back down Warwick Street towards the Quattro. Straight from a funeral to a lover's arms?

_And what kind of man shacks up with a bird who is pregnant to someone else, even if that someone else is dead?_ Hunt stopped briefly and looked at his boots and the footpath beneath them. Forced himself to concentrate on how he might feel if a woman he loved were carrying another man's baby. He knew the answer – the immediate clutch in his gut – and walked briskly on.


	6. Chapter 6

_**VI **_

**The lyrics to 'Don't you want me, baby' by the Human League do not belong to me.**

_Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. _

_Rest eternal grant them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine on them. _

Again she had nearly walked past the line of identical posters. They were plastered across the building next to Luigi's, and she had ignored them for weeks. Now Alex stopped as the Latin began to sing in her mind. _Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,_ the first lines of the requiem. The poster advertised a Christmas Eve performance of Gabriel Fauré's requiem by the London Tavener Choir. On in about two hours.

The early evening had darkened into a cloudless, nearly moonless night, and the yielding part of her was already walking down the steps to Luigi's, ready for a bottle of wine and a night of Christmas television. And what had she to look forward to on Christmas Day? Walks through the deserted streets, more television, more wine.

_It's a requiem, a bloody funeral mass on Christmas, and it's so morbid that I can't resist_, Alex thought, ripping one of the posters from the wall so she had directions to the concert hall.

"Signorina, here is your drink." Luigi was on her side, she knew, as she pulled herself up onto a stool at the bar. Even though she was responsible for the dramatic drop in his custom, he had quietly demonstrated his support these past three weeks. His normal condition was melancholy anyway – and she had never enquired why – so he was simpatico for a kindred spirit. He wasn't the most responsible guardian angel – he allowed her to drink too much, but then he also prompted her gently back up the stairs to her flat in the early hours.

"Buon natale." Alex raised the glass of Chianti to his health.

* * *

"Don't ever let me catch you calling me a miserable bastard again, Biro." Hunt dropped the two boxes of spirits and beer onto the desk. "Usual party rules apply. I will kill the man who mixes a drink in this office. Rodney here will try and drink shandys all night given the chance."

Some of the team had orders to be back home by this time, but as Ray pushed open the office doors with a third box of spirits, they knew it was going to be a very long night. With Hunt, staying until the terrible, puking end was as obligatory as any other order, unspoken or not.

He toasted the first round. "I hate Christmas speeches, so this will be the shortest, most uninspiring one you will ever hear. This team did our bit this year. For every hour we messed about, we spent the next dealing with the filth of Greater London. There will still be scum on the street tonight and we will probably get bloody noses cleaning up the mess tomorrow morning, but don't forget that we are just cogs in this enormous wheel and we have no choice. Merry Christmas."

Merry Christmas.

He soon tired of hearing about the Christmas holiday plans – Jimmy's annual pilgrimage to civil war battle sites, Ray's ambitions for pulling drunken birds, Chris's bemoaning his imminent departure for the caravan park his parents ran up in Clitheroe. Especially bloody Chris, acting forlorn because he had to leave Granger for a week of shovelling bird shit off the caravan roofs while his parents continued their thirty year cold war of a marriage.

Hunt picked out the most quality bottle of whisky and went into his darkened office, shutting the door on them all. He liked the party better from in here, where the voices were just noise. Maybe he was a bit depressed. Maybe that afternoon he had gone to the Lambeth Forensics Unit in the hopes that Drake would have relented just enough. But it seemed like she could put it all behind her, just as he had always suspected. A minute after the four-eyed little git had gone, she'd come in and coldly told him to leave too.

And he should put it behind him, too. _Out there, that lot would expect nothing less. _After all, in their version he had broken her heart. _And I should just knock this fucking bottle back and find another bird to shag and shame._

Only he looked down his from his office windows, as Skelton put his party mix tape on the stereo.

_Don't, don't you want me. You know I can't believe it when I hear that you won't see me__? _

And down below on the street, Alex Drake emerged from Luigi's entrance, rummaging through a bag he had never seen before, in a dress he had never seen before. Her left shoulder bare again, typically idiotic on this beautiful, near-freezing night. He resented whoever she was meeting.

Skelton's mix tape was messing with his head. _Don't you want me, baby?_

He opened the door a little – Skelton still dribbling on about how he couldn't bear the week ahead, without Granger. Romeo and twatting Juliet.

Romeo and Juliet were simple, equally in love, equally ready to die. He'd seen the movie. _Bloody Olivia Hussey. _What happened when the person you wanted seemed determine to walk away, when everything they did baffled you, but you still woke up in the morning hoping to see them?

At first, when Drake had laughed at every crude overture, it had made him laugh too. That was part of the fun – watching as disgust grew into the odd scent of reluctant admiration, unwilling attraction. Hunt could tell she would come around gradually and she did – maybe his face wasn't so ugly, maybe he wasn't so one-sided. And Hunt had thought there was an understanding growing, and it hadn't needed to be talked of or thought about. But so what? He'd been wrong and his capitulation to Vanderzee's demand of a transfer had seemed sensible at the time, perhaps a way to force a clean break. Break the feelings off cleanly.

_You think you've changed your mind. You'd better change it back or we will both be sorry._

But this felt just a bit like a punishment without a natural end. With no lesson to learn.

* * *

_In paradisum deducant te angeli, in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres,  
et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem. _

_May the angels lead you into paradise, may the martyrs receive you in your coming,  
and may they guide you into the holy city, Jerusalem. _

It occurred to her as she looked up above to the vaulted arches of the 17th century hall … the voices of the choir were disembodied. They belonged to angels, not the choir of fifty middle-aged women and men in their ugly turquoise gowns and ill-fitting tuxedos. Alex studied the patterns in the ceiling. Everything white and cream in this concert hall, and her eyes raised above the concert scenes – the formally dressed, the shuffling knees and drooping programmes, the fop-haired violinist – looking up she could merely feel the many people in the aisles around, could feel them as stirred by the music as she was. But she felt separate from them.

_What if this is paradise?_

So many times she had felt removed from this world, even though her fingers could reach out and feel a beating heart, and she could smell and taste. Still, she had laughed at the absurdities all around her. This world inside her head was supposed to be a holding place until her mind healed and her eyes opened to 2008. But lately she'd started to notice that these constructs, these cases that she'd just thought were riddles for her to solve so she could get better, this life and this world were starting to grow roots, entangling her.

_What if I am dead now, and this is my paradise?_

Not sure why she turned around, because who did that in a vast hall full of people? Metres behind her, in the last row there they were, Hunt, Carling, Shaz, Skelton. All uncomfortable, all drink-soaked and bored, Carling's face evidence that Gene had forced them to come along. And she had no idea how long they had been there.

Shaz smiled, a beautiful smile. Hunt refused to look at her.

She smiled back.

* * *

"Signorina." Luigi knocked again and she peered around the open door, wearing only her underwear. Mascara had formed a halo around her eye lids, but she didn't care. "I have been trying to wake you all morning, Signorina. It's nearly one pm."

"Yes." She pretended to examine her watch.

"Merry Christmas," he continued. "But please get yourself dressed. I have made a Christmas dinner downstairs in the restaurant and you promised to join us."

"I did?" Skeptical. _No I didn't._

"Yes, a week ago." He was such a liar. "And I have prepared your place at the table so I will be very offended if you do not come down now."

Oh. Alex shut the door, and the matter seemed beyond arguing. She felt groggy and cold-hearted at the thought of joining Luigi and some enormous extended family of ex-patriot Italians. Italian Christmas songs, a special Christmas lamb meal that she would have no nostalgic taste for.

"I'm waiting outside this door!"

Oh. And oh again as she came down the stairs and sniffed an ordinary English Christmas turkey, and saw serving bowls with roast potatoes and tinned peas. Luigi flew away from her to the long table he had set, angry at Ray Carling, who had already begun to help himself to a plateful of vegetables.

There was nothing to do, but take the place saved for her between Shaz and Chris. Refuse the paper party hat and accept a glass of champagne. Of course Alex felt embarrassed – she hadn't talked to these people in weeks. But they were embarrassed too, except Shaz who squeezed her fingers. No one mentioned the concert hall and the last dramatic notes of the Fauré Requiem. Ray covered the silence by telling them how he had stashed the half-full spirit bottles in his bottom desk drawer. "I always wanted a drinks cabinet."

Luigi got up again to attend to the turkey in the kitchen and Chris immediately leaned into her. "Be nice to him, he's obviously so lonely, poor bugger."

"Skelton, you twat." Hunt flicked the paper hat off Chris's head with his knife. "This is Luigi's version of serving up Christmas dinner to the homeless." He examined the blade of his knife and added, "Nice of you to join us, Drake. Luigi mentioned that you were going for some kind of all-England record in drowning your sorrows up there." Carling nudged him. Apparently the plan had been to go easy on Drake, she saw, but Hunt had blown it in the first sentence.

Alex poured herself another glass of champagne, strangely delighted at how horridly this table had come together. The sickly champagne, the limp parsnips and clumpy peas, and now a turkey of truly epic size set down on a platter before them. She sweetened her smile for Luigi – he'd overcome his loathing for English food to provide them with the perfect Christmas.

"Oh! I forgot the cranberry sauce. Scusi."

"Don't any of you have other Christmas plans?" Alex asked. "Shaz, I thought you'd be with your parents in Southend today."

"I was, but Chris has to go and stay with his parents for the next week so I wanted to spend the Christmas dinner here with all of you. And it's nice, isn't it? All of us together."

Carling ripped a drumstick away from the turkey.

* * *

"I'd like to raise a toast to Luigi." Chris's glass met all of theirs. "That part where Luigi lit the brandy pudding and set the table cloth on fire was dead brilliant."

"And I'd like to announce a Christmas truce on Italian jokes … just for this one day," Alex added. "I think Luigi's proved, and I know it because I feel like I am going to give birth to a concrete block, that he has truly come to grips with English Christmas..."

The police radio crackled and Hunt moved away from the table to hear better. They others fell silent, the mood deadened by the prospect of Hunt heading out the door.

"Right. Viv says somebody has thrown a Molotov cocktail through Vicky Conning's kitchen window. The good people of St John's Wood were already miffed about having a murderer in their midst, so they will love this Christmas cracker." He hadn't looked at Alex, and her head was down. They hadn't spoken, just toyed with their food as both were accustomed to doing and drank steadily. He hadn't come here with much of a plan anyway."Carling, you take Skelton and go see what's happening at Vicky Conning's. You too, Granger. Wouldn't you to see you both parted in the last hours before Christopher's tragic departure." Gene looked on, expressionless as they filed out through the empty restaurant and up the steps.

* * *

Ray ran around the side of Conning's house into their back garden. The intruder must have come this way, stopped briefly on the still dewy grass to light the rag in the bottle and lob it through the kitchen window. He examined the broken window pane. The glass was thick enough. Someone had meant business.

He came closer. Vicky was sweeping up the glass on the kitchen floor. Her lunch had been laid out neatly on the wooden kitchen table – a glass of water, a ham and salad sandwich, an apple. Usually half the time in an incident call-out was in quelling the victim's fears that the perpetrator would return, but she must have used a fire extinguisher to put out the flaming bottle, and seemed unhappy, but calm enough.

"Just keep a watch outside from the car," he radioed Chris. "It might be a neighbour's kids. Maybe they're hanging around to see what they've done."

That suited Chris – he clambered through into the police car's back-seat beside Shaz.

"Do you think they'll sort it out?" Shaz craned her face away from his lips.

"Who?"

"DCI Hunt and DI Drake."

"Sort what out? I s'pose he'll have to let her down gently again if she tries it on... what?"

"You don't really believe that? That rumour is so pathetic. I bet Ray made it up just to make himself feel better." From the look on Chris's face she could tell he wasn't following. "I heard from Vanderzee's secretary that DI Drake was forced to transfer because someone photographed them kissing and Vanderzee wanted her out. It's awful."

"Yeah,' Chris agreed, shifting away from her. "Just as well she got transferred."

"No, Chris! It's awful she got punished." Shaz felt like the car's back-seat was suddenly far too narrow. "I don't know why you've all got it in for her anyway. She was always nice to me."

"I don't not like her, Shaz. I just think that she's weird and half the time she said something and you didn't know what she was on about. And the other half of the time, she was telling the Guv where he was going wrong."

"She was usually right!"

"No," he shook his head firmly. "It's just better now."

"She saved my life." Shaz couldn't find a strong enough sentence – it would be spiteful, but she was suddenly glad he was leaving for up North today. And she wanted to tell him so.

* * *

"The decent thing would be for us to do the dishes," Alex murmured, watching the pyramid of champagne glasses grow higher.

"Eh?" Of course, it would never have occurred to him. Luigi had cleared the dishes away and disappeared into the kitchen, and she could see that to Hunt, that was just brilliant.

To cover the silence, he started the Christmas carol tape playing again, fast-forwarded through dreary _Silent Night_ and leaned over the bar to nick three bottles of Asti Spumante.

"But it's so ungrateful after what he's done for us." She really doubted she could have moved anyway, but surely even constructs didn't want to feel taken for granted. Gene shuffled across the restaurant floor and opened the door to the kitchen, just enough so that she couldn't see inside. She rolled her eyes at the stage-managed conversation. _No, no, signore, I don want your help. _

"Well if you insist." He couldn't have banged the door shut fast enough. "He wouldn't hear of it." Hunt poured the first bottle over the pyramid of glasses and she watched in fascination at the frothing trail, like a fountain, except she had to scoot her chair to avoid the run-off onto the table. "And now he's going to have to mop the floor too."

"Why are you getting all domestic?" The look on his face suddenly made everything very plain.

"You paid Luigi to put on this dinner..."She knew her cheeks were getting red, both with the drink, but she felt embarrassed too. She had so many hard, unkind feelings towards him, and here he'd bothered to set up this ruse to cheer her up. And was now scrambling to get out of drying the dishes.

"Our job is to drink until these are all gone," and Hunt reached for the glass at the top of the pyramid as gently as if it were the star of Bethlehem on a Christmas tree.

"This is just irresponsible." But she was smiling just a little.

"Drink." Gene leaned in closer as she took the glass. "Let me know when you're not pissed off at me anymore and then you can stop."

"And then what?" Alex did not drop her gaze as she emptied the glass, and he handed her another and emptied his own.

"I couldn't help any of it."

"You could." Another gone, the floor wet with sticky sweet fizz under their shoes, some on her jeans. "You could have told Vanderzee to shove it. Shove whatever favour he's been showing you. I didn't even think you cared about that kind of thing."

"And then what would have happened?" From the turn around his mouth and the flickering movement of his eyes Alex could tell he was thinking about what would have happened if Dorothy Lange hadn't sent her photographs to CID. "The way I remember it, I was being painted as a dirty old pervert, picking on one of his vulnerable young staff."

"I was the one punished for it," she retorted straight back, downing another glass in earnest now and knocking another to the floor. "And you know, you could have defended me a bit. Just a 'she's a bird, but she does a good job' comment thrown in there before they typed up my transfer papers."

Gene leaned across the table, the vein below his eye visible in his frustration. "Well, you're better off, aren't you? With all them fellow psychologists who actually understand a word you say? ... oh no, it's fine. I get it. All that talk about them liking women, them 'getting' you … all rubbish." He motioned with his hand to stop a denial. "You were just trying to make the Gene Genie jealous. Well, keep drinking. I can tell it's going to be a long afternoon."

They took a glass each.

_See amid the winter's snow, born for us on earth below,  
see the tender Lamb appears, promised from eternal years._

* * *

"I don't think …" Alex waggled a finger at him, her cheek red from leaning on her arms over the table. "I don't think I could get rid of you if I tried."

His head was also in his hands. "You have a very high opinion of yourself. I think you have me confused with that spacky twat who tried to trade decoded government documents for a peak at your C cups. Mind you..." He lifted his head a little, eyes drifting down. "I was always good with numbers."

She held his gaze a moment, blinking slowly in that mesmerising way. "I'm still to going to make you pay, Gene." But they both baulked at the thought of having to drink another and Luigi frowned at them from the bar. Two hundred quids' worth of hospitality had run out a couple of hours ago. He muttered as Hunt ordered him to turn the carols tape back on.

"I'm glad you're going to make me pay." Gene found his hand moving to beside hers, his fingers drumming on the table. "You're a ruthless cow and it keeps me on my toes. I don't like having to feel guilty or sorry. It's not what I do." He was very pleasantly coming off a spectacular, fizzy pop drunken high. It would be sickening at the end, but this moment was drifting on and on.

"You're harmless."

"Test me." _Go on. _But his head fell back into his arms and he could barely turn it to keep staring at her. And she was the same as she took her time looking at his eyes, the scars around his mouth, the hair falling over his brow.

_Hail, thou ever blessed morn;  
hail, redemption's happy dawn;  
sing through all Jerusalem._

"This is the prettiest carol I have ever heard," Alex murmured, reaching for the last glass of champagne before his hand stopped her. For the second time in a week, his thumb pressed against the soft flesh of her palm. Only she didn't move her hand away, and the thumb began to caress her hand.

* * *


	7. Chapter 7

_**VII**_

"Wake your big bum up. You're coming with me."

She groaned an indignant "no" and pulled a pillow onto her head to block the command out, but he snatched it away. There was that sea-sick feeling again, only this was merely a nauseous, hang-over disorientation. Not sure why Hunt was in her room in the morning, not sure what time it was – she lifted her head, but discovered she actually couldn't make herself understand the alarm clock – not sure what day either.

"Come on. I just got radioed that there's some more trouble over at Vicky Conning's. Carling's been keeping a watch on the place, but he probably got distracted by some Swedish au pair walking down the street or summat."

"I want to sleep."

"Yeah, well I'm meant to be packing for me trip home to the world's greatest city. Get up."

What kind of supernatural ability did he have that, after a couple of hours' sleep, he looked completely fresh, and was now kicking her bed repeatedly like an energetic little kid. "Don't make me pull that cover off you." And he lifted the edge of the duvet anyway, caught a brief glimpse of her bare legs and arse. "It's my lucky day. A large double-breasted bed-thrasher."

"Good lord," Alex kicked out at him. "I'm not going anywhere." They had both stumbled upstairs to her flat the previous night and collapsed onto the couch. So drunk that when she'd staggered to her bedroom and stripped down to her underwear she hadn't cared that Gene stood in the doorway watching. Then she'd fallen straight back onto the bed, practically asleep then, but she'd still felt him cover her with the duvet and kiss the side of her mouth slowly. Last thing: the sound of him banging an arm or leg against the doorframe finding his way back into the dark living room.

Now they were practically tussling over the duvet. "It's Boxing Day, Bolly. You and I have nowhere else to go, nothing else to do." He cocked his head to one side. "Let's be having you."

"You're not **having **anything."

"Fine." Hunt went over to her chest of drawers. "I've been wanting to do this."

"What?"

"Pay you back for messing with my socks and boxers. Only I'm going to enjoy handling your knickers a lot more than you did mine. Now, get up if you don't want this lot on the floor." Hunt wrenched open the top drawer and looked back at her thoughtfully as he pulled out the Actaeon file. "Well, well."

At the sight of the file in his hands, she jumped up quickly onto the cold floor.

* * *

"Now you're speaking to me again, tell me what's in that 'Acting' file you've got there." Hunt swung the Quattro into the tunnel, ignoring her protests at being thrown against the passenger door.

"It's Actaeon."

"Well, I gave you the Artemis one, for whatever it's worth. But I suppose that you had Timmy four-eyes decipher part of Actaeon? So come on and explain, Alex." But he didn't push it. He'd handed over the Artemis file, gladly too, because it had been the only reason she'd speak to him. Not that it was worth much, he thought. Just numbers like the Actaeon file. And whatever that freaky little weirdo had found out, well Drake was obviously not ready to tell him. Still it made him uneasy. He might have enjoyed playing the hiding game – shifting the Artemis file around his office and home to evade the anonymous sneaks who had come looking for it – but there was something so reckless in the way she operated, she was bound to attract attention sooner or later.

Alex kept her hand over her mouth for much of the drive out to St John's Wood. The streets were clear enough – Boxing Day and people would be sleeping through their own hangovers or tidying away the wrapping paper and pine tree needles – but she felt jittery as well as nauseated. Had snapped at him over the Actaeon file, and he hadn't asked any further. Maybe if he'd persisted she would have confided what she knew, but that was the odd thing about Gene … sometimes he didn't persist.

_Well, he kind of persisted. _She hid a smile by turning to the window and the gentle, tree-lined streets they were speeding through. There was something about the man; he just didn't give up trying although she'd flung all her bitterness at him. It reminded her of some of the sessions with Sam Tyler, when he'd talked in such depth and with a fond smile about his delusions. How he'd spoken of his grudging admiration for Hunt. _Irrepressible_, Tyler had said. Yes, that was it.

Glancing at him, she thought_, you won't apologise and I don't trust you. But I think I missed you, you bastard. _

Hunt's eyes should have been on the road.

* * *

He felt uneasy as they turned into the Conning's street and saw the ambulance and two marked police cars outside the house.

"Guv." Ray jogged out from the gate to meet them. Carling's eyes told the whole story – guilt, agitation, anticipating what was inevitable. "I just needed an hour's kip. She must have..."

Hunt pushed past him and strode down to the back garden. A body lay under a white sheet under a sycamore tree. The forensics unit and ambulance cleared off and left him and Alex alone in the garden. He bent and lifted the sheet from Vicky Conning's face. He could tell immediately – a suicide, the most peaceful death possible. The woman was a chemist after all, and her method of death had been in her own hands.

Alex bent beside him and he asked, "Why would she come out here?" Although it was peaceful, for all the police activity. Raked leaves, deck chairs with their peeling white paint. For some reason, he took the dead woman's hand. There was no comforting her now and there never had been.

"Look how carefully she brushed her hair and look, how she chose just this spot. Maybe it was a place where she always knew she could think properly, could be free of the distractions inside her house."

"She told me she was fine," Ray interjected, pacing behind them. "I just wanted to keep an eye on the street in case them arsonists came back."

"Fuck's sake!" Hunt turned on him. "Well done, she killed herself while you were outside the door. Guess she felt she could top herself in peace with the Met's finest guarding the threshold." Normally he would have bitten back any further criticism, but there was something so unnecessary about this peaceful scene. "Did you bring her a bloody glass of water out here so she could swallow her pills?"

Gilbert pushed past Ray to hand Hunt something, a suicide note.

"Did you call a bloody ambulance straight away?" Gilbert's look told him no. "Maybe she could have been saved. Fuck's sake, get back to CID. Start filling out the incident report."

He handed the note to Alex and looked over her shoulder.

_I know that no one can help me. I don't have anyone. I am not a murderer._

"What?" He snatched it back from her, taken aback at the anger in her expression when she looked at him. "What?"

"You were giving Ray a bollocking," she said. "But did you investigate it? Did you? I told you to."

"Yes I bloody did."

"It doesn't add up."

"I know that!" The rising volume in her their voices had drawn the neighbours, standing on the bench in their garden to peer over the wall.

"Well, how are you going to help Vicky now?"

"Sir," a plod interrupted. Apparently Assistant Commissioner Vanderzee wanted a polite word. Hunt stared at the policeman's outstretched hand, and the police radio in it. Then walked away.

* * *

Amanda Hook was shaken by the news – even more shaken that the police had pushed past into her front hall and run the man in her bedroom to ground. It wasn't the two nice plain-clothes policemen she'd met in the news room, but a woman and a man, both angry, walking through her house and taking a look for themselves.

"Jason!" She'd pleaded with her boyfriend as he fought against the hold of the two uniformed policemen. The angry policeman had followed him into the kitchen, and a minute later Jason came back with a bloody swollen lip.

"I didn't meet you the other day when my subordinates questioned you on your relationship with the late Russell Conning," the man said sourly to her. "You shoulder-tapped his wife pretty well, from what they told me. And I saw your show-stopping performance at the funeral."

Amanda sank into an arm chair, silent.

"Vicky Conning's killed herself, and I am just bloody wish I had hauled you in for questioning before she got the chance."

"What do you mean?"

Hunt pushed Jason into the wall. "Did the love of your life Russell Conning know about Pablo here? Or are you telling me you managed to pick this bloke up fresh on your way back from the funeral?" The indignation was fading slowly from her face and she felt a surge of emotion in her chest. _It's just pregnancy hormones_, Amanda thought as the woman police officer watched her closely. But she couldn't herself from crying,as they towered over her, and the man's anger seemed to only grow. She looked up – there were words forming on her lips, but she said nothing and nodded as Jason held a hand against his mouth and demanded a lawyer.


	8. Chapter 8

_**VIII**_

She picked her mail out of the wooden post-holes at the entrance to the Forensics Unit. A belated letter sent before Christmas by CS Paulson to confirm her transfer out of Fenchurch East. _Merry Christmas to you too__. _Another folded sketch from her young admirer. _Hmmphh_, Alex thought, for while Royce no longer sat outside her door, he had moved his chair further along the corridor long so he could still monitor who came and went from her office.

Bemused Alex held out the sketch to him – Royce with his pumped-up first in the air and standing over a certain grey-suited, mean-faced, acne-scarred gentleman. "This has got to stop."

He wouldn't meet her gaze. Go home, she thought for the umpteenth time. He'd told her that his parents had given him a computer for Christmas. Why wasn't he home feeding floppy discs into it instead of leaving drawings of his beating heart with a dagger thrust into it, and...

"Royce, you've been opening my mail! Now this **really** has to stop." Alex held out an envelope, the glue on it loose from an obvious steaming._ Little bugger_. Part of her wanted to inform that she'd be ringing Gene about this. "I am going to have a word with your father today. There's a limit, Royce, and..."

She moved away, instantly forgetting Royce as newspaper clippings fell from the envelope. An item from page two of the Telegraph floated to the carpet in front of her open office door. Photos of Vicky Conning and Russell Conning with a short piece about her suicide and his murder. Another lay under it, but not a story about the Connings. Greedily she read it and greedily she gathered up the three clippings and shut the office door behind her.

The second clipping was about a murdered politician, an aspiring Labour Party MP from Bristol who had killed his wife in an apparent murder-suicide pact. The story was much older, she noted from the April 1979 date at the bottom of the page. And another clipping from a year ago – two young women, members of a mothers-against-the-bomb protest movement, who had jumped together to their deaths in the Thames.

Alex felt inside the envelope – ripped it open. But there was nothing else. Except she hadn't noted the handwriting on the back of the clipping about the Connings – written in tiny, neat hand-writing in the margin.

_Alex Drake. I have left London, and now you have to leave too. You already know too much._

"Know what?" she cried aloud, looking around the silent room in exasperation. "I don't know anything!"

* * *

"Smoke the entire packet and calm the bloody hell down!" Hunt glared at Ray as he swerved the Quattro down the suburban street, riding in and out of both lanes to avoid the cars pulling out from driveways, the loitering teenagers, the postman. "It's simple. In lieu of that Vanderbastard being able to bullock me out, he reached for you."

"I couldn't make out what we'd done wrong. He kept going on about us wasting time on the whole Conning thing while...." With the Quattro's weaving, Ray couldn't keep the lighter steady to his mouth.

"Don't listen to a fucking word he says. He's a game-playing little bastard. He's probably got the works of Machiavelli in his bedside table instead of the Dutch language version of the Bible." Hunt was unconcerned as the Quattro rode the curb nearly all the way into a parked-up Austin. "I'm making a new office rule. We don't talk about CID business to anyone doesn't get their hands dirty with London's scum."

"He practically told me I was fired!"

Hunt jerked the hand-brake on. "No one fires you except me." They both leapt from the car and broke into a run after the sprinting figure of Jason Nolan. Jason had emerged seconds after the Quattro had turned into Amanda Hook's street. Immediately Hunt saw why he was fleeing. He was trying to catch up with a grey Audi that had also pulled away in a hurry. How many people in it? Hunt had the stitch, and sweat clung to his brow and hair as they turned another corner and the grey car couldn't speed up, cruising and weaving so that Jason Nolan could catch up to it.

"Fucking hell, Raymondo!" And somehow Ray, despite his bulk, was gaining on Nolan and the Audi. That spurred Hunt on and as Jason Nolan stretched a leg out and held onto the door frame to pull himself into the backseat, both cops lunged for the boot. Thumped on it.

Hunt caught the pensive look on Amanda Hook's face momentarily before the momentum of the car took his feet out from under, the door slammed, Jason was inside. He fell forward, face first. Ray kept up with the accelerating car longer and pulled his gun out to shoot the tires out, but luck was with Amanda as he had to leap onto the sidewalk to avoid another car and dropped his gun into the gutter.

Amanda turned in the back seat to watch them. She was fleeing but she had nothing to fear.

"I got the license plate." Panting, Ray pulled Hunt to his feet, gave him his handkerchief. "They won't get far."

Frowning at the streaks of dried snot on it, Hunt held his hand to the gash on his chin. "You think so?"

"Sure, Guv. I'll radio into the station and ensure the stations are all looking for them."

"Yeah, do that." After a minute, Hunt finally threw him a conciliatory look. "It's okay, Raymondo. It's not your fault."

* * *

"The Assistant Commissioner's secretary left that for you," Viv said. "Said that Vanderzee was sorry he didn't get to thank you before you go on holiday."

Hunt stared at the bottle of Scotch on his desk. No bow tied around it – no card and no kind words. But it was top-shelf and it was Vanderzee's Christmas gift to him. The bloke was certainly surprising, Hunt thought as he carried the bottle out through CID, acknowledging with a nod the good byes and the "enjoy your holiday, Guv". His chin was badly grazed and it would remind him for days yet that Vicky Conning's chief accuser had got away, had been driven away with her lover. He was sure he would never find out where Amanda Hook had gone to.

There was something vaguely annoying about it, and he glanced at the bottle as he drove through the twilight back to his flat. A thank you for a case that had been so comprehensively bungled. Hunt was sure there were layers and layers, and he would never peel them back, and would never be given the chance or the time.

He'd started to chew his nails again, and the skin around them. A bad childhood habit, but it concentrated his thinking as he crossed the road to his building. The sad old bloke who lived on the top floor and kept pigeons was returning from the butcher with his mince.

"Here you go," Hunt handed him the bottle and ran inside to avoid the man's response. He didn't like mysteries. Some people did because they were like Vanderzee – they had endless confidence that mysteries would always be revealed, the secret heart discovered. But he knew often there were layers and layers, but no centre at all. And then what did that do to you?

Layers and layers – his front door was open. From outside he could look down the dark hall and see his own things disturbed and uprooted. Hunt picked his way carefully among the torn-up books, the smashed plates and glasses, the video tapes with the film unravelled. Someone had taken the time to do that just for kicks.

The only thing he now did was pick up the phone and dial Drake's home phone number. When she answered, he just gave her the order to get over here in five minutes and she didn't argue.

* * *

"It's time for a reckoning."

They sat opposite each other, Hunt's coffee table in between them.

"Put all your fucking cards on the table now," he said, "because I have had it up to here with being involved in this business when I haven't got the faintest about what it's about."

Alex nodded, shivering. She still couldn't get the mess the intruders had made out of her mind. It was appalling. She'd even started to tidy it up, but he'd shouted at her to leave it.

Now he ripped the files - Actaeon and Artemis - out of her hands, frowned at the newspaper clippings she'd stapled to the inside of the Actaeon file and the piece of paper with the two names Royce Gilbert had discovered.

"Someone sent me the clippings in the mail," she murmured and pointed to the handwriting at the bottom of the item about Vicky Conning.

"This gets better and better." But he left that clipping alone, and read another, the article about the death of the two young mothers who had leapt to their deaths from a bridge over the Thames.

"It doesn't make much sense to me," she said, but stopped herself from continuing because now he had picked up the sheet of paper with the two names Royce Gilbert had discovered. "Vavasour. Lilley." Fiercely he stared at her, repeating the names over and over. He was thinking and his eyes roved over her face absently.

"I can't make head or tail of it," she followed him into the kitchen as he kicked away the broken crockery and poured himself a Scotch. Stared into the cupboard. "What is it, Gene?"

"So that kid said he used some super-computer to try and uncode all them numbers and all it came up with were Vavasour and Lilley?"

"Yes. Sort of."

He put his finger down on the clipping. "Those women's deaths were put down as suicides."

"Why? Did you investigate them?" She was suddenly aware of how likely it was that somewhere among this mess a listening device had been planted. Turn the radio on, turn on the television, the record player, the kitchen taps.

She switched on the radio in his bedroom as well, trampling over his books and tossed clothes to join him at the window there.

"We thought it was kind of funny." With a look to her – _don't start on me now _– He looked down into the darkening street. A kid skidding across the footpath on her roller-skates. "The official verdict was that they'd killed themselves over some lesbian affair gone wrong. It's hard to remember but I think they'd met each other on some hippie march against the government and fell in … you get the picture." He looked at their grainy black and white images from the newspaper clipping. "It was sad, but you know ... it seemed pretty straight-forward. They were already sad – couldn't get blokes – and then one of them went and cheated on the other one, and they decided to both top themselves. Goodbye cruel world." He ignored her protest and lit a cigarette. They were standing close enough, but she had to whisper into his ear to make herself heard.

"The thing is ... you don't forget a name like Vavasour. One of the factors behind the suicide seemed to be that **this** one," he pointed to the picture of one of the dead women, "she fell in love with a member of the protest group they belonged to. We interviewed her and she admitted it … her name was Anna Vavasour. Posh." He looked away to exhale. "Like you."

"It's like with that woman Vicky Conning – it's all about jealousy and death. But why?"

He was biting his thumb again. Took a long moment. "I didn't tell you this before because … because I didn't want you going off your trolley."

"Tell me what?"

"Before he took over as director of the research lab at Bramley, Russell Conning worked for ten years at Edgehampton." Hunt drew her back to the window. "Don't fucking start on me, Drake ... One of them women who jumped into the Thames had a job at Edgehampton too, years ago, before she decided her time was better employed knitting rainbow scarves to protest the cold war."

He let go of her arms and trod off, suddenly wanting another drink and she sat down on his bed, her thoughts so crowded she looked around the floor for a pen. She needed to process this, write it down. It was exhilarating, but in the cold chaos of Hunt's bedroom, it was also making her wrists shake with fear.

Alex bent down to pick up a pencil, and noticed the brown envelope half hidden by the disturbed bed clothes. In the kitchen Gene was slamming the fridge, and she heard another glass shattering on the floor. She opened the envelope, but had already guessed they were Dorothy Lange's surveillance photos.

Glossy, dense – the whites as deep as the blacks, the shutter snapping shut on each fat rain drop that had splashed onto their faces, the fierceness in his face that had almost frightened her, even somehow (and she took in a sharp breath) the desperation they'd both felt that night. Herself? Could she even recognise herself in the woman caught here? In Vanderzee's office she had leapt up so quickly to deny them – she hadn't even looked at the photos properly. And now she did, she was almost astonished.


	9. Chapter 9

_**IX**_

"You don't have to do this. I'm fine."

"Shut up." Hunt unlocked her front door and pushed the door open, peering into the dark hall. "Christ on a bike."

"What?" She skirted past him into the stillness. "What?!"

"You haven't tidied up since I stayed over on Christmas." Hunt walked slowly through the flat, critically examining the debris of her nights. The intruders had either not come here, or had been very considerate. They both flinched as the phone rang. Hunt made to answer it, but Alex snatched the receiver from his hand. "Hello."

"Alex Drake?"

"Yes."

"Did you get the package I sent you?" It was a terrible, crackling line. A man calling from far off?

"Yes!" She fended Hunt off with one arm, turning away from him. "Yes, but I can't figure it out. You have to tell me."

Hunt finally managed to snatch the phone away. "This line isn't safe," he said abruptly into the receiver. He gave Luigi's number and told the caller to give them a minute.

"Line sound weird?"

"Yes."

"Dozy bird, it's bugged. You're not thinking straight."

Both sprinted through the door, tumbled down the stairs as the phone in the bar began to ring and Luigi crossed the room to pick up the receiver. Alex dove for it. "Hello!"

"So you know what kind of danger you're in?" A non-descript Southern accent. The line was far better this time.

"I don't know anything. I need to talk to you."

"I can't meet you. I left London and I'm not coming back."

"Can we meet wherever you are, then? I need to talk."

The line was silent.

"Please … I'm not getting very far."

"You're better off … no, you've actually come too far now."

"I understand. You know about Artemis?"

Silence again, then, "Why are you playing around with this?"

"I'm not." She turned away from the cosy light and clinking glass sounds of the restaurant, blocking everything else out. "You have no idea. This is life and death to me. I have to meet you." She listened for a minute, nodding, wishing she had a pad and pen. Concentrating on the directions the caller gave her.

* * *

"No."

Ignoring him, Alex had begun to hastily fold clothes from her wardrobe into an overnight bag. He sat on the bed, tossing them back out towards the wardrobe again.

"You can't stop me, Hunt."

"I don't have to. You said yourself your car wouldn't start this morning." And he waited for it. _Here it comes. Alex Drake special tactics no.1._ Her voice softened – in the muted light of her bedroom, her dark eyes expected. This was what she thought of him – one holding gaze and he would do anything she asked.

"Come with me then."

"No." And Gene kicked the bag under the bed as if to finish the argument. "Some nutter sends you his newspaper clipping collection and you immediately want to drive hundreds of miles up North to meet him in the middle of a bloody forest." He ignored the protest that _it's not like that_. "I am putting my foot down. I know you don't work for me anymore, but you can probably find yourself a rental car tomorrow, but I am telling you, You need to loosen your bra or whatever is restricting the blood flow to your brain and go to your job in Lambeth tomorrow."

"You could take me. You're going that way." She really did have tickets on herself, and he could tell she thought she was close to swaying him.

"It's not all the _fucking_ same up North. You're talking a hundred miles away from where I'm headed." He walked swiftly out to her front door. "Bolls, I am going back to Manchester to visit the few soused old relatives that still talk to me. I'll probably end up wanting to throw myself into a ruddy canal. But that's what Christmas time is all about. Family and friends."

"Then why do it?"

_Fuck._ The look on his face was dark, dirty. Where she was from, holidays meant ski-trips to the French Alps no doubt, and motoring through Provence, just like those twats at Vanderzee's Christmas Party. How did you explain that the price of him living in London was the annual return to Manchester every year to face down the past? He'd lived so much of his life in a place she had probably never been to – sights she knew nothing about, rough experiences and places. Sometimes the past intruded so fiercely in his sleep that the present here in London seemed dreamlike in comparison. He didn't want to argue anymore. "I have to go." And his face was still sullen, but he gestured, "Now come here."

_No, _her look said as she started to pack again._  
_

"Alex, come on." And slowly she moved towards him and allowed him to take her hand, entwine his fingers in hers. He wanted a kiss, but she merely pressed closer to him for a moment. She was so agitated she could barely be still in his arms. Sighing, he let her hand slip and shut the door firmly as he left.

* * *

"Phone call for you, Signore."

He'd just asked to settle his bill with Luigi. Looked around the warm room – none of the CID lot were here. _Oh fuck._ Felt in his pocket for his keys. Understood immediately. The line was silent. He flung down the receiver and threw down three hundred quid on the bar.

Luigi protested – _Hunt! Is too much!_ – but he was already outside, taking the steps two at a time, shouting curses as the Quattro's engine started, revved provocatively. Alex beamed at him from the driver seat – that annoying bloody self-satisfied smile. "Get in, Gene."

"Get out of my motor, Drake."

But she was pulling away from the curb already, coasting as he held the passenger door open, and urging him to jump in. "I've checked the map, Gene," she called over the sound of the engine. "It's not very far from Manchester at all. Just a day trip really."

"Get out, Drake," he repeated. "I will throw you onto the motorway at the first opportunity..."

"Gene." Fuck her, she was doing it again. Her look said, _No you won't, Gene. _She had a hand on the gear-stick, her mouth a little open, a little delighted as she put a gentle foot down on the accelerator.

Despite himself, Hunt pulled himself down into the car, panting and outraged.

As they rounded the corner from her street, leaving Luigi's and CID behind, as cold air rose visibly from the roads before them, she was silent and smiling. He couldn't bloody stand it.

"Come on, Gene." She shook her curls at him. "Road trip? You and me."

_Road trip._ He began to bang his head back against the black leather head-rest. It was times like this that made him remember that Drake was not just a bird he had wanted to shag from the moment he'd carried her through the doors to CID. She was deluded, cheerily deluded and driving his precious car with her single-minded zeal off into the sub-zero night-time.

She was trying to make it sound fun, but he could hear the tension in her voice – always the fucking same with her. Searching desperately for something that would take her away, back to this mysterious perfect _wherever_ where her daughter was.

"Smile, Gene." The conciliatory glances, so smug now she had her way, didn't fool him for a second. Maddened him in fact. "It'll be great. I'll be your angel of the North, Gene." _Odd thing to say. _Her smile promised nothing specific, but enough that he turned glumly to the window and watched the lights flash by.

"We are swapping places before you hit the motorway."

**the end**

**The next story in this series is Walk Into the Twilight (rated M).  
**


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